TechWag

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If you are the person who starts a thread in FriendFeed you have the ability to delete comments within the thread that you started. The question is should you delete comments, or under what circumstances will you delete comments on your thread. It would be great if there could be a personalized “I’ll delete your comment if it is found offensive, uses swear words, is not generally safe for work (NSFW)” or other such ideas. The debate is raging now on FriendFeed on when, if, or why you should delete comments.

You can read the entire conversation right here.

In many ways, FriendFeed comments are just like blog comments, or any other comment you are going to get on any other system. There is always some nut job out there, either trying to hijack the thread, throws out a conversation killer, or is being trollish, baity or gets all stabby on the people in the thread. There is no particular person in mind, or personality, people just sometimes go right off the deep end when they want to dominate the conversation rather than use the conversation to either influence or learn about other opinions.

I think the only time I would delete a comment is when it gets what I see as abusive, and it takes a lot for me to consider something abusive. The only other exception I can think of this is when it starts looking like spam. I am not so concerned about thread hijacking or conversation killers. People do what they are going to do in the way that they are going to do it, just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean anything. There are lots of things I don’t like. Keeping the thread intact has its benefits.

One of the biggest benefits to keeping a thread intact comes in when they use their real names, or their tags/alias is generally well known. Since FriendFeed search results for aliases, tags, and real names can come in fairly high in the return, this makes it easier for me to work out who are people I want to hire. If there is a lot of generally bad behavior coming from a tag/alias/real name, then I have something to think about. If I see that they are being generally helpful, then that gives me good things to think about. You can use FriendFeed comments as a way of weeding out good people who have something positive to say from people who are generally the opposite from helpful.

I am voting for keeping the comments intact, at some point, someone in HR, or a social worker is going to want those comments.

Tags: Technorati, comments, friendfeed, interesting, abuse, spam, helpful, positive